1. Not Accounting

1

No balance sheet in sight…

This is not a book on accounting. This book will not teach you how to create a balance sheet, income statement, nor cash flow statement. If you already know how to produce or read any of those standard accounting statements, then free your mind from any new advice that may conflict with your experience. If not, then don’t worry. A startup financial plan is not that complicated.

The goal of this book is to teach you how to build a startup financial plan from scratch, specific to your business. This plan will help you answer a few key questions about your business:

Will the business ever make money?

If so, when will the business make a profit?

And if so, how much money will be needed to reach profitability?

These answers will then tell you whether your idea is worth working on and, if so, how big of a challenge you face.

Additionally, whether the plan is viable or not, you will walk away with a far better understanding of how the money flows through your proposed business and how you could change the model to improve the business.